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Post Office Proposes Special Rate For Mailing DVDs
An anonymous reader writes "The United States Postal Service is seeking to implement a special postage rate for companies such as Netflix, GameFly and Blockbuster (PDF), which send DVDs to their customers and then receive them back. This proposal for special rates for two-way mailers of optical disks follows a protracted legal complaint from GameFly, which argued that Netflix was receiving special handling by the Postal Service while paying a cheaper postage rate."
You buy volume and pay a different price? Basic economics ... how can a company do business otherwise?
first
Mailing, shipping companies should be able to do whatever the hell they want with their postages, etc., of-course USPS is not a company, they are the government and will eventually die off as a species and the sooner the better.
You can't handle the truth.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/03/the-cost-difference-in-mailing-netflx-vs-gamefly-all-of-gameflys-profits/
The reason GameFly pays more is because their mailers weigh more. Netflix keeps the mailer at 1 ounce and pays 44 cents each. GameFly's mailer is 2 ounces and they pay the two ounce price. The big giant clue in the linked article is that the USPS is considering changing the price of the 2 ounce mailer to the price of a 1 ounce mailer.
So the real story is that GameFly wants a discount with zero actual justification.
The packaging for GameFly costs more. Work it into your business model or reduce the packaging weight.
I don't do business with GameFly but if I did, I'd cancel. They actually have the nerve to pretend Netflix is getting some kind of special treatment while they are the ones seeking it.
There is nothing unfair about what the USPS is doing. The rest of us have to pay by the ounce for our mail.
Work Safe Porn
Then Netflix will just start using UPS or Fedex. If it costs the same, why use USPS when the others offer better service?
The G
I have Netflix and I'm on one of the bigger plans of 5 at a time and this last week has been a postal service cluster F***. Last Saturday I put 5 DVD's in the mail slot at the post office and on Monday two were received by Netflix and the other three didn't get there until Tuesday. Then on Wednesday I put two back in the mail and one arrived Thursday and the other still didn't arrive on Friday and I had to call and have it declared missing. Now keep in mind that according to the mailers the PO box that it's going to is in the next town over, I can't understand how DVD's that go in the mail at the exact same time some take an extra day to arrive.
I don't even install optical drives in machines I build anymore. Mailing DVDs seems like an outdated activity these days.
PDFs can contain all sorts of crapware, and Slashdot isn't exactly known for vetting its submissions.
#DeleteChrome
Why would anyone do that, it's the 21st century.
It's like some older people pasting an image inside MS word to export it as PDF then email it to someone.
Hello there.
Gay men propose a special rate for shitting on CmdrDildo's face!
"We can't (won't) qualify for the special rate that the post office created for use by other DVD mailers, so we want to force them to give it to us anyway or stop giving it to those that do qualify" What a bunch of crybaby asshats. I remember that Netflix had to re-design their mailers to be able to go through the postal automated system, if gamefly won't then too bad for them.
Don't put your customer out of business.
It's called media mail. I've been using it for well over 20 years now.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What are these, "DVD"'s you're speaking of?
Surprised netflix hasn't just started renting games. They'd kill off gamefly in a heartbeat.
...
If the USPS were really smart, they could've offered the overnight delivery for an even lower price by taking the media from the sender, ripping it, transmitting the data to the recipient's local office, and making a new disk over there to deliver...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
To those who claim that mailing discs is old or that optical media is dead:
Where do you get your high quality (spec-wise, not content-wise) audio and video?
Has streaming just become "good enough"? Where are high bit-rates, the uncompressed audio, the extras, the commentary tracks, the subtitles?
Actually private companies DO invest money so the pensions they promised will be paid. Typically, the employer sendd their part to an IRS or 401k account in the employee's name. That way, the money is there 40 years later while the employee is retired.
Occasionally, an employer will get caught screwing around with that and not properly investing that money on behalf of the employees they promised it to. That's called fraud. It's just that federal agencies were allowed to commit this type of fraud. With the internet, USPS may not have the revenue to in 40 years to cover the retirement pay for today's employees. That's why they now have to invest retirement pay for today's employees today, just like private companies do.
What is a DVD?
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That's a rumor put out by the union, and false.
They have to ESTIMATE, not pay, what today's employees might collect 75 years from now.
When they hire a 20 year old worker, they are promising to continue paying that worker when he's 80 - which is 60 years from now. They have to make a written estimate of how much today's promises will cost them in the future.
This is standard stuff, what's called Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (GAAP). Every company that issues stock follows the same rules.
There IS a problem for them. The problem is they were allowed to get forty years behind. Now they have to get caught up. Private companies generally don't get behind to begin with.
What they were doing is using today's revenue to pay retirement for employees who worked forty years ago. Now they have to switch to investing today's revenue for today's workers. Paying as you go, as they are now required to do, isn't a problem. That's how everyone other than government does it. The problem is the switch - catching up from being forty years behind.
It's a lot like they'd been living on credit cards for forty years. Now they are only allowed to spend what they make - and they have ten years in which to pay off the debt they had racked up.
I suppose that if you download stuff on a metered cell plan then the bandwidth used to download a DVD worth of data could affect your bill. I'm on cable so it would not affect mine.
In that case, the real estate cost of moving into cable's service area might affect your bill.
Private companies generally don't get behind to begin
HaHaHa!!! Put that tea down buddy, so many private companies have fallen so far behind on their pension funding that the rate of pension plans being rescued by government insurance has skyrocketed and the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation has had to dramatically boost insurance premiums. And that's *after* the government revised the funding laws to allow the private companies to assume returns that are only achievable by putting your pension money in investments of the same risky quality as the CDOs which did so well in 2008.
SWFs from ad networks can contain crapware as well, and Slashdot itself embeds SWF ads unless you subscribe or karma whore to get the "Disable Ads" checkbox.
A streaming service with every film ever produced is not likely in either of our lifetimes. For one thing, it'd have to include Song of the South, and Disney has made it clear by its actions over the past two decades that it doesn't plan to release that film as part of its standard "vault" rotation.
Digital Versatile Disc is a cost-efficient medium for moving 4 to 8 GB packets of data in and out of geographic areas not served by a wired broadband provider. Cellular ISPs in the United States charge on the order of $10 per GB for microwave data transmission; satellite ISPs aren't much cheaper.
I had no idea Blockbuster was still in business.
What is the rationale for subsiding DVD rental?
I understand the special rate means the price difference comes from tax payers' pockets. That could be fine if it was something for the sake of general interest, but here?
Of course you completely ignore the FACT (as established by a court of law) that the postal service is, rather than putting the Netflix envelopes through the sorting machines that GameFly's disks have to travel, hand sorting the Netflix envelopes at no extra charge so that they are not subject to the same levels of breakage as GameFly - and when Gamefly asked to be treated EXACTLY THE SAME AS NETFLIX, the post office refused.
So go take your bullshit elsewhere until you learn how to actually read more than one biased story.
Netflix does ~97% of the DVD mailer volume, and because of that, and the fact that Netflix mailers are easily identifiable due to their red packaging, they are often sorted out from standard mail and handled differently...on the other, a governmental institution should not be favoring or discriminating.
I would hope like hell that ANY business, government or not, would evolve a special process to handle any one item that represented such a large percentage of traffic. Although it might appear to be favoritism, in reality it's just being efficient by treating a known quantity in a way that reduces the load across the rest of the system.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
With the economy sucking ass for the last five years, pension plans haven't received the investment returns they planned on, so some are a little behind what they expected. They invested the money as required, they just couldn't have predicted the worst economy since the great depression. That's a completely different thing than failing to invest at all and falling 40 years behind, as USPS did.
Since 1974, companies have been legally required to make those investments. The law is called ERISA. USPS now has to do the same.
If you Google "pension failure", you'll see about 20 stories about failed government pension plans for every 1 failed company plan. Why? Because companies are required to invest ahead of time and governments aren't. Governments are allowed to engage in the same boondoggle as USPS, so they fail. Just last week, Detroit's city workers found out they aren't getting the pensions they were promised. Should we do the same thing to postal workers?
On another note , the bill requiring that USPS catch up on their payments had four sponsors, two Democrats, two Republicans. None of Democrat senators objected to the bill. So the idea that this was a republican thing is just silly. It's a common sense thing.
Finally, AOL can make its triumphant return.